Designing resilience in payments

If your business relies on payments, then it relies on payments resilience.

So what is “payments resilience” anyway?

Payments resilience refers to the capability of a payments service to maintain its uptime and provide resistance to attack and downtime.

There are very providers globally that can provide a 100% payments uptime guarantee 365 days a year – so if you’re not processing your payments through one of those avenues, then what are you going to do when they are not operating?

The options available to you are:

Accept that your payments processing will not be available 100% of the time and plan to deal with outages or failures

Find a processor that can guarantee 100% uptime

Spread the load over a number of processors

One of the elements of design that most senior engineers understand is that going from 99% of anything to 100% of anything almost requires double the effort!

Not up 100% of the time

Most financial institutions globally do not offer 100% uptime. Put simply, they cannot afford the financial liabilities that attach themselves to such promised uptime. So, if you approach a financial institution and are advised that they are up 100% of the time, test them.

Ask for data on uptime. Ask for public graphs on uptime.

That leaves you with going to a payments processor. The fact is that while most processors may build for 100% uptime and may be better than the offerings from financial institutions, not many achieve that goal.

The “cloud” for payments processing is not a saviour either. Architecting payments processing for the “cloud” has also had a chequered past. Most processors and institutions have had mixed success, but none have dominated.

If you want to accept, or simply need to accept (and yes, there is a difference), that payments are not going to be available 100% of the time, then contact us – we can help you develop a plan to deal with these situations.

Finding a processor with 100% uptime

There are not many processors capable of performing at this rate. If you do find one, then you need to ask some basic questions, such as:

Why do they maintain a 100% uptime?

Can you show me customers who have this uptime and the reasons that they need this uptime?

What is the additional cost of this performance uptime?

What other functions are made available to me – such as prioritised customer service when an outage does actually occur.

If you want assistance in processing your payments 100% of the time, then contact us – we can help develop a plan and appropriate questions to be asking in order to make the right decisions upfront and longer-term.

Spreading the payments load over processors

This option is not for the faint-hearted, requires a specialised engineering effort on your behalf and the careful choice of processors and financial institutions. Here are some of the challenges:

End-funds that you are collecting have to ultimately end up in one bank account – otherwise the finance team in your business will have a painful time executing simple functions such as reconciliation and simple costs management.

If you are storing credit/debit cards, then they will need to be stored with a token (to maintain PCI-DSS compliance) – how do you get those tokens operating with multiple processors and financial institutions?

How are you going to manage chargebacks from multiple sources?

Is your business financially capable of accepting additional costs in performing a transaction, both from a pure cost perspective and a staff overhead perspective?